Cinema: Fadeout for Censors?

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In the careless youth of the cinema, long before the first feature-length film, the U.S. screen was as free as the U.S. press. Then, in 1907, Chicago gave birth to movie censorship. Last week, after decades of kowtowing by a timid film industry, enemies of censorship made a strong bid to end the reign of censors now entrenched in seven states and 50 cities.

Into Atlanta's federal district court trooped legal representatives of Independent Producer Louis de Rochemont, who helped launch the "Negro-problem" movie cycle with his Lost Boundaries (TIME, July 4), and Film Classics, Inc., the picture's distributor. They asked for 1) an injunction against last summer's ban on the film by Atlanta censors (who found that it would "adversely affect the peace, morals and good order" of the city); and 2) a ruling that Atlanta's censorship laws violate the U.S. Constitution.

De Rochemont was determined to carry the suit up to the U.S. Supreme Court. He had pledges of cooperation from the Motion Picture Association of America and the American Civil Liberties Union. It was true that in 1915 the U.S. Supreme Court had found the fledgling movies a vehicle of entertainment rather than, opinion, and had upheld state censorship laws as no violation of freedom. But only last year, in another opinion, the Supreme Court observed that the movies were clearly entitled to the Constitution's protection of free press.

Some Atlantans wondered why their censors had let themselves (and censors everywhere) in for a legal wrangle. Lost Boundaries, the true story of a Negro family that passed for white, had played successfully in such cities as Jacksonville and Birmingham. And the day before the De Rochemont suit was filed, Pinky, another Negro-problem film, opened to packed houses and a good press in Atlanta itself, with no noticeable effect on the city's peace, morals or good order.